GENED 1: UNDERSTANDING THE SELF
CHAPTER I: DEFINING THE SELF: PERSONAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL
PERSPECTIVE ON SELF AND IDENTITY
LESSON 1: THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES
At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
1. Explain why it is essential to understand the self;
2. Describe and discuss the different notions of the self from the points-of-view of the various
philosophers across the time and place;
3. Compare and contrast how the self has been represented in different philosophical schools; and
4. Examine one’s self against the different views of self that were discussed in class.
INTRODUCTION
Before we even had to be in any formal institution of learning, among the many things that we
were first taught as kids is to articulate and write our names. Growing up we were told to refer back to
this name when talking about ourselves. Our parents painstakingly thought about our names. Should
we be named after a famous celebrity, a respected politician or historical personality, or even a saint?
Were you named after one?
Human beings attach names that are meaningful to birthed progenies because names are
supposed to designate us in the world. Thus, some people get baptized with names such as “Precious”
or “Lovely”. Likewise, when our parents call our names, we were taught to respond to them because our
names represent who we are. Our names signify us. Death cannot even stop this bond between the
person and her name. Names are inscribed even into one’s gravestone.
A man is not the person itself no matter how intimately bound it is with the bearer. It is only a
signifier. A person who was named after a saint most probably will not become an actual saint. The
self is thought to be something else than the name. The self is something that a person
perennially molds, shapes, and develops. The self is not a static thing that one is simply born
with like a mole on one’s face or is just assigned by one’s parents just like name. Everyone is tasked
to discover one’s self.
Have you truly discovered yours?
ABSTRACTION
The history of philosophy is replete with men and women who inquired into the fundamental
nature of the self. Along with the question of the primary substratum that defines the multiplicity of
things in the world, the inquiry on the self has preoccupied the earliest thinkers in the history of
philosophy: the Greeks.
The Greeks were the ones who seriously questioned myths and moved away from them in
attempting to understand reality and respond to perennial questions of curiosity, including the question
of the self. The different perspectives of and views on the self can be best seen and understood by
revisiting its prime movers and identify the mist important conjectures made by the philosophers from
the ancient times to the contemporary period.
INSTRUCTOR: MA. CHARISH LIANNE Y. COJAMCO
Prior the Socrates, the Greek thinkers, sometimes collectively called them the Pre-Socratics to
denote that some of them preceded Socrates while others existed around Socrates time as well,
preoccupied substratum, arche that explains the multiplicity of things in the world. These men are like
Thales, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus and Empedocles, to name a few, were concerned with
explaining what the world is really made up of, why the world is so, and what explains the changes that
they observed around them.
They locate an explanation about the nature of change, the seeming permanence despite
change, and the unity of the world amidst its diversity.
Socrates and Plato
After series of thinkers from all across the ancient Greek world who were disturbed by the same
issue, a man came out to question something else. This man was Socrates. Unlike the Pre-Socratics,
Socrates was more concerned with another subject, the problem of the self. He was the first Philosopher
who ever engaged in systematic questioning about the self. To Socrates, and this has become his life-
long mission, the true task of the philosopher is to know one self.
For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul. This means that every human person is
dualistic, that is, he is composed of two important aspects of his personhood. Meaning, all individual
has an imperfect, impermanent aspect to him, and the body, while maintaining that there is also a soul
that is perfect and permanent.
Plato claimed in his dialog that Socrates affirmed that the unexamined life is not worth
living. Plato, Socrates’s student, basically took off from his master and supported the idea that man is
a dual nature of body and soul.
THREE COMPONENTS OF THE SOUL ACCORDING TO PLATO:
1. The Rational Soul – forged by reason and intellect has to govern the affairs of the
human person.
2. The Spirited Soul – in charge of emotions should kept at bay.
3. Appetitive Soul – in charge in desires like eating, drinking, sleeping and having sex
are controlled well.
When this ideal state is attained, then the human person’s soul becomes just and virtuous.
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas
Augustine’s view of the human person reflects the entire spirit of the medieval world when it
comes to man. Following the ancient view of Plato and infusing it with the newfound doctrine of
Christianity, Augustine agreed that man is of a bifurcated nature. An aspect of man dwells in the world
and is imperfect and continuously yearns to be with the Divine and the other is capable of reaching
immortality.
The body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of spirit
bliss in communion with God. This is because the body can only thrive in the imperfect, physical reality
that is the world, whereas the soul can also stay after death in an eternal realm with the all-transcendent
God. The goal of every human person is to attain this communion and bliss with the
Divine by living his life on earth in virtue.
INSTRUCTOR: MA. CHARISH LIANNE Y. COJAMCO
Thomas Aquinas, the most eminent thirteenth century scholar and stalwart of the medieval
philosophy, appended something to this Christian view. According to him, man is composed of two
parts: matter and form.
• Matter or hyle in Greek refers to common stuff that makes up everything in the universe.
• Form or Morphe in Greek refers to the essense of a substance or thing.
For Aquinas, the soul is what animates the body; it is what it makes us humans.
Rene Descartes
Descartes is the Father of Modern Philosophy, conceived of the human person as having a body
and a mind. In his famous treatise, The Meditations of First Philosophy, he claims that there is so much
that we should doubt. In fact, he says that since much of what we think and believe are not infallible,
they may turn out to be false. One should only believe that since which can pass the test of doubt.
The only thing that one cannot doubt is the existence of the self, for even if one doubts oneself,
that only proves that there is a doubting self, a thing that thinks and therefore, that cannot be doubted.
“Cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore, I am”.
COMBINATION OF TWO DISTINCT ENTITIES ACCORDING TO DESCARTES:
1. Cogito – the thing that thinks, the mind.
2. Extenza – extension of the mind, the body.
The body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind. The human person has it
but not what makes a man a man.
Knowing Yourself is the Beginning of Knowing Everything.
- Aristotle
INSTRUCTOR: MA. CHARISH LIANNE Y. COJAMCO
